David's interest and curiosity were becoming more and more excited as he gazed with tender compassion at this unfortunate youth who seemed now as utterly crushed as he had been violently excited a short time before. Suddenly the door opened, and Madame Bastien appeared, accompanied by the doctor. "Where is my son?" asked Marie, glancing around the room, without even seeing David. Madame Bastien could not see her son, the armchair in which he had thrown himself being concealed by the door that had been thrown open. On seeing this beautiful young woman, who looked scarcely twenty, as we have said before, and whose features bore such a striking resemblance to Frederick's, David remained for a moment speechless with surprise and admiration, to which was added a profound interest when he learned that this was the mother of the youth for whom he already felt such a sincere compassion. "Where is my son?" repeated Madame Bastien, advancing farther into the room and gazing around her with evident anxiety. "The poor child is there," said David, in a low tone, at the same time motioning the anxious parent to look behind the door. There was so much sympathy and kindness in David's face as well as in the tone in which he uttered the words, that though Marie had been astonished at first at the sight of the stranger, she said to him now as if she had known him always: "Good Heavens! what is the matter? Has anything happened to him?" "Ah, mother," suddenly replied the youth, who had taken advantage of the moment during which he had been hidden from Madame Bastien's sight to wipe away his tears. Then bowing with a distrait air to Doctor Dufour, whom he had always treated with such affectionate cordiality before, Frederick approached his mother and said: "Come, mother, let us go." "Frederick," exclaimed Marie, seizing her son's hands and anxiously scrutinising his features, "Frederick, you have been weeping." "No," he responded, stamping his foot impatiently, and roughly disengaging his hands from his mother's grasp. "Come, let us go, I say." "But he has been weeping, has he not, monsieur?" again turning to David with a half-questioning, half-frightened air. "Well, yes, I have been weeping," replied Frederick, with a sarcastic smile, "weeping for gratitude, for this gentleman here," pointing to David, "prevented me from falling out of the window. Now, mother, you know all. Come, let us go." And Frederick turned abruptly toward the door. Doctor Dufour, no less surprised and grieved than Madame Bastien, turned to David. "My friend, what does this mean?" he asked. "Monsieur," added Marie, also turning to the doctor's friend, embarrassed and distressed at the poor opinion this stranger must have formed of Frederick, "I have no idea what my son means. I do not know what has happened, but I must beg you, monsieur, to excuse him."